| 1 | This is versioncheck 1.0, a first stab at automatic checking of versions of
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| 2 | Python extension packages installed on your system.
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| 3 |
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| 4 | The basic idea is that each package contains a _checkversion.py
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| 5 | somewhere, probably at the root level of the package. In addition, each
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| 6 | package maintainer makes a file available on the net, through ftp or
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| 7 | http, which contains the version number of the most recent distribution
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| 8 | and some readable text explaining the differences with previous
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| 9 | versions, where to download the package, etc.
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| 10 |
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| 11 | The checkversions.py script walks through the installed Python tree (or
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| 12 | through a tree of choice), and runs each _checkversion.py script. These
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| 13 | scripts retrieve the current-version file over the net, compares version
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| 14 | numbers and tells the user about new versions of packages available.
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| 15 |
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| 16 | A boilerplate for the _checkversion.py file can be found here. Replace
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| 17 | package name, version and the URL of the version-check file and put it in
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| 18 | your distribution. In stead of a single URL you can also specify a list
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| 19 | of URLs. Each of these will be checked in order until one is available,
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| 20 | this is handy for distributions that live in multiple places. Put the
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| 21 | primary distribution site (the most up-to-date site) before others.
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| 22 | The script is executed with execfile(), not imported, and the current
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| 23 | directory is the checkversion directory, so be careful with globals,
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| 24 | importing, etc.
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| 25 |
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| 26 | The version-check file consists of an rfc822-style header followed by
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| 27 | plaintext. The only header field checked currently is
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| 28 | 'Current-Version:', which should contain te current version and is
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| 29 | matched against the string contained in the _checkversion.py script.
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| 30 | The rest of the file is human-readable text and presented to the user if
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| 31 | there is a version mismatch. It should contain at the very least a URL
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| 32 | of either the current distribution or a webpage describing it.
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| 33 |
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| 34 | Pycheckversion.py is the module that does the actual checking of versions.
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| 35 | It should be fine where it is, it is imported by checkversion before anything
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| 36 | else is done, but if imports fail you may want to move it to somewhere
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| 37 | along sys.path.
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| 38 |
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| 39 | Jack Jansen, CWI, 23-Dec-97.
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| 40 | <jack@cwi.nl>
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| 41 |
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